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Compared With Cubs, White Sox Can’t Win for Winning

A well-attended Cubs-Cardinals game at Wrigley Field last month.Credit
Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

CHICAGO — The first-place White Sox, in the thick of a pennant race, hosted the Seattle Mariners at U.S. Cellular Field on Saturday on a gorgeous 86-degree evening. A crowd announced at 27,562 was on hand as the home team won, 5-4. Earlier in the day, eight miles north at Wrigley Field, a crowd announced as 35,296 watched the fifth-place Cubs lose to the equally bad Colorado Rockies.

With both of Chicago’s major league teams home over the weekend, a season-long — decades-long, for that matter — trend was on full display: at the box office, the White Sox, despite being a contending team, are no match for even a cellar-dwelling Cubs squad. Through Saturday, the White Sox, sporting a 70-55 record, were 24th in attendance, averaging 24,568 fans. The Cubs, 27 ½ games out of first place, were 10th at 36,826.

“It’s baffling,” said Bob Verdi, who covered both during 42 years at The Chicago Tribune. “You’ve got a Triple-A team on one side of town and a very likable, very good team on the other.”

It is no fluke, though. The last time the White Sox outdrew the Cubs was in 1992, U.S. Cellular’s second season. Even after the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, the Cubs outdrew them the next year despite finishing 30 games below .500. The White Sox have never drawn three million fans; the Cubs have done it eight straight seasons.

There is no shortage of theories about this puzzle, which is part of the fabric of the city. As many explanations are rooted in psychology, geography and socioeconomics as in baseball. The Cubs play on the tony North Side, the Sox on the grittier South Side. Slick bars and restaurants surround Wrigley, while the not so affectionately nicknamed Cell is nestled among parking lots and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Or there are just a lot more Cubs fans than White Sox fans.

Conventional wisdom holds that the fan split in a metropolitan area of 9.5 million is around 60-40 in favor of the Cubs. Even if the disparity is greater, that still leaves plenty of White Sox fans, and according to Comcast SportsNet Chicago, while the numbers are close, White Sox broadcasts have generated higher ratings than the Cubs’ this season.

“Sox fans are a very passionate group,” said Steve Stone, a current White Sox broadcaster, who pitched for both teams and has served as a television and radio analyst for each. “Unfortunately, for a number of reasons — some of them economic — they don’t come out as much.”

It was not always like this. From 1951 to 1967, the White Sox outdrew the Cubs in 16 of 17 seasons. The White Sox, in 1983, were the first Chicago team to draw two million fans.

“Believe it or not, I covered the Cubs when they used to close the upper deck because they couldn’t get anybody up there, “ Verdi said. “It’s unthinkable today.”

Photo

A spectator with lots of room to himself at a White Sox-Twins game at U.S. Cellular Field.Credit
Tannen Maury/European Pressphoto Agency

Stone pointed to the early 1980s as the period of the seismic shift, when the Cubs were bought by the Tribune Company and the iconic announcer Harry Caray left the White Sox for the Cubs. Both moves came just a few years after WGN became a national “superstation,” putting the Cubs on television across the country (the Sox pulled themselves off WGN in 1968). The Cubs then made a playoff run in 1984 — their first since 1945.

“Kids came home from school, and as my old producer used to say, we were the only thing on not starring a doctor,” Stone said. “Harry was the greatest salesman of baseball I’ve ever seen; then the Cubs won. It was a perfect storm.”

When the Sox threatened to move to Florida during contentious negotiations for a new stadium in the late ’80s, their public relations director remarked, “Between the mystique of Wrigley Field and the marketing power of the Tribune Company, it’s like sword-fighting with Zorro.”

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The neighborhood surrounding Wrigley has also blossomed. The average home price last year was near $1 million, compared with $255,000 in Bridgeport, where the Sox play. And with new ballparks popping up around the country, Wrigley’s quaint antiquity has increased its popularity. It is now the third most-visited tourist attraction in Illinois.

As Cubs Manager Dale Sveum said: “We have an experience here. That stays the same, win or lose.”

The White Sox have not rolled over. They cut ticket prices this season, with the average dropping below $30, according to Team Marketing Report, versus nearly $47 at Wrigley.

And after complaints about the White Sox stadium, which opened in 1991, renovations have made it a more comfortable place to watch a game. New in-stadium bars have been opened to help offset the scarcity of entertainment in the neighborhood.

The White Sox are also consistently competitive, with payrolls regularly near the top of the league. But while Cubs fans are often caricatured as hopeless romantics, White Sox fans are commonly regarded as a skeptical group, even profoundly negative.

“We call them unique,” said Brooks Boyer, a White Sox vice president and chief marketing officer. “There are layers of fandom here. There’s ‘I’ll go when they’re good,’ and sometimes that becomes ‘I’ll go when they’re good and the weather’s nice.’ ”

But sometimes even that is not enough. Last week, with the first-place Yankees in town, the series averaged just more than 26,000 over three pleasant summer nights — and it was a White Sox sweep, no less. Yankees announcers noticed, as Michael Kay and Ken Singleton were incredulous at the small crowds.

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2012, on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Compared With Cubs, White Sox Can’t Win for Winning. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe